Thinking outside the storage box

With storage growth tracking at 60% annually, according to IDC, enterprises face a dire situation. Throwing disks at the problem simply doesn't cut it anymore. Andrew Madejczyk, vice president of global technology operations at pre-employment screening company Sterling Infosystems, in New York, likens the situation to an episode of "House," the popular medical drama.

Click here for tips on how to deal with your growing volumes of unstructured data

"On 'House,' there are two ways to approach a problem. You treat the symptoms, or you find out what the root cause is and actually end the problem," Madejczyk says. "With storage, up until now, the path of least resistance was to treat the symptoms and buy more disks" - a method that surely would ignite the ire of the show's caustic but brilliant Dr. Gregory House.

Were the doctor prone to giving praise, he'd give a call out to enterprise IT managers who are rethinking this traditional approach to storage. He'd love that technologists are willing to go outside their comfort zones to find a solution, and he'd thrive on the experimentation and contentiousness that surround the diagnosis.

House probably would find an ally in Casey Powell, CEO at storage vendor Xiotech. "Everybody acknowledges the problem and understands it, but nobody's solving it. As technologists, we have to step back, look at the problem and design a different way," Powell says.

Optimizing the SAN

Today most organizations store some combination of structured, database-type and unstructured file-based data. In most cases, they rely on storage-area network (SAN) technologies to ensure efficiencies and overall storage utilization, keeping costs down as storage needs increase.

In and of themselves, SANs aren't enough, however. Enterprises increasingly are turning to technologies that promise to provide an even bigger bang for the buck, including these:

•  Data deduplication, which helps reduce redundant copies of data so firms can shrink not only storage requirements but also backup times. (For a status report on data deduplication products, listen to this podcast now.)

•  Thin provisioning, which increases storage utilization by making storage space that has been overprovisioned for one application available to others on an as-needed basis (see "Thin provisioning: Don't let the gotchas getcha,").

•  Storage tiering, which uses data policies and rules to move noncritical data to slower, less expensive storage media and leave expensive Tier 1 storage free to handle only the most mission-critical applications.

•  Storage resource management software, which helps users track and manage storage usage and capacity trends. (Compare Storage Resource Management products.)

"In the classic SAN environment, these tools don't just provide a partial solution. They allow you to make fundamental improvements," says Rob Soderbery, senior vice president of Symantec's Storage and Availability Management Group. Clients that have pursued these strategies even have been able to freeze storage spending for a year at a time, he says. "And when they get back on the storage spending cycle, they get back on at about half the spending rate they were at before," he adds. (Get more insight from Soderbery in this podcast, “Is storage resource management right for you?”).

Although few IT executives report such dramatic reductions in storage spending, many are pursuing such strategies.

At Sterling, for example, moving from tape- to disk-based backups via Sepaton's S2100-ES2 virtual tape library reduced the time it takes for nightly backups from 12 to just a few hours, Madejczyk says. Sepaton's deduplication technology provides an added measure. In addition, he has virtualized more than 90% of his server environment, "reducing our footprint immensely'" and implemented EMC thin provisioning and storage virtualization.

Still, his company's storage needs keep growing, Madejczyk says. "In this economy, Sterling is being very responsible and careful about what we spend on," he says. "We're concentrating on the data-management part of the problem, and we're seeing results. But it's a difficult problem to solve."

Tom Amrhein, CIO at Forrester Construction in Rockville, Md., has seen similar growth. The company keeps all data associated with its construction projects in a project management database, so the vast majority of that stored data is structured in nature. Regulatory and compliance issues have led to increased storage needs nonetheless.

"Most companies need to keep their tax records for seven years, and that's as long as they need to keep anything," Amrhein says. "But tax records are our shorter-cycle data. Depending on the jurisdiction, the time we could be at fault for any construction defect is up to 10 years - and we're required to have the same level of discovery response for a project completed nine years ago as we would for a project that's been closed out two weeks."

Forrester Construction has cut down a bit on storage needs by keeping the most data-intensive project pieces - building drawings, for example - on paper. "Because the scanning rate is so high and paper storage costs so low, retaining those as physical paper is more cost-effective," Amrhein says.

The real key to keeping costs in check, however, is storage-as-a-service, Amrhein says. IT outsourcer Connectria hosts the company's main application servers, including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint; project management, finance, CRM and Citrix Systems. It handles all that storage, leaving Forrester Construction with a predictable, flat monthly fee.

"I pay for a set amount of gigabytes of storage as part of the SLA [service-level agreement], and then I pay $1 per gig monthly for any excess," Amrhein explains. "That includes the backup, restore and all the services around those. I'm paying $25K a month to Connectria, plus paying for about 10GB over my SLA volume. That overage is a wash."

For the firm's unstructured data, Forrester Construction uses Iron Mountain's Connected Backup for PCs service, which automatically backs up all PCs nightly via the Internet. If a PC is not connected to the Internet at night, the user receives a backup prompt on the next connection. (Read a Q&A with Iron Mountain Digital President John Clancy.)

"With 60% of the people out of the office, this is perfect for us," Amrhein says. "Plus, Iron Mountain helps us reduce the data volume by using deduplication," he says. "Even for people on a job site with a wireless card or low-speed connection, it's just a five- or 10-minute thing."